i own a 50lb vacuum marinator/tumbler and am looking for advice regarding making bacon. In many recipes for homemade bacon, there are curing salts, etc used in what appears to be a week to ten day process of marinating and rotating/flipping in a refrigerator. Is the purpose of this process simply to impart flavor, with the curing salts used to make the length of marination possible without bacteria buildup?
My daily use for this machine is to brine poultry quickly (and the machine is wicked awesome at it), but it just seems like I could flavor the pork belly in twenty minutes, what seems to take 7-10 days otherwise. My initial thought was to make a liquid extract from salt, black pepper and whatever spices I wanted to flavor the belly with, toss it in and tumble it.
Am I off base? Thanks for taking it easy on the new guy!
P.s. Thanks to this site for the equilibrium brine. I utilize it daily.